Update, 2015-11-30 It appears that NOAA has gone through and upgraded all of the OISST files to the newer version of the NetCDF file format. As a result, the functions outlined in this post don’t work any longer. Instead, see the updated functions in my newer post, http://lukemiller.org/index.php/2014/11/extracting-noaa-sea-surface-temperatures-with-ncdf4/. The concepts are the same as described here, but the newer functions use the ncdf4 package to access the newer NetCDF file format.

The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration generates freely-available world-wide estimates of mean daily sea surface temperature, and has been doing so back to 1981. The data are on … Continue Reading

I’ve added the archived temperature data for the Marine Science Center to my current conditions page: http://www.lukemiller.org/seawater/. The complete timeseries, with some large breaks when the monitoring computer was shut down, can be downloaded in this csv file: 2010-2012_MSC_temps.csv (5MB, right-click and save-as). There are three columns, with the timestamps in Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5, no daylight savings adjustment), water temperature and air temperature in degrees Celsius. Missing data are recorded as NA.

Update, 2015-11-30 It appears that NOAA has gone through and upgraded all of the OISST files to the newer version of the NetCDF file format. As a result, the functions outlined in this post don’t work any longer. Instead, see the updated functions in my newer post, http://lukemiller.org/index.php/2014/11/extracting-noaa-sea-surface-temperatures-with-ncdf4/. The concepts are the same as described here, but the newer functions use the ncdf4 package to access the newer NetCDF file format.